In an increasingly networked world, more and more traffic, such as data, voice, and video, is transmitted over public and proprietary networks. Wireless networks, in particular, are becoming increasingly popular as networks through which subscribers obtain both voice services (e.g., telephone calls) and data services (e.g., email and web surfing).
In real networks, bandwidth is limited. For a variety of reasons, traffic in the network can become congested. When network congestion occurs, buffers at network nodes can become full, resulting in the dropping of data, such as data packets. Dropping packets in response to full buffers can adversely affect applications using the network.